Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET, Second Edition

What Is an Object?

Objects, which are derived from classes, are encapsulations of data and code; that is, an object comprises both its code and the data it uses. For example, say you need to keep track of employees in an organization, and that you need to store a number of pieces of information for each employee, such as Name, Date Hired, and Title. Consider also that you need methods for adding and removing employees, and you want all of this information and functionality available to a number of different applications in different departments within your organization (possibly even across platforms). You could write the necessary code to do all of this in each and every application throughout your organization, but this approach would be difficult ...